Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry and David Zucker grew up together, and their dads were business partners in a real estate company.
In their 2023 book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, Jerrry Zucker explained that they spent hours, growing up, watching serious TV shows like The Untouchables, Sea Hunt, and Mission: Impossible — “shows where the characters just took themselves so seriously, and we’d blurt out ridiculous lines for them to say.”
And in Airplane, “we actually got those same tough-guy actors to say the lines we always wished they would have said.” They included Untouchables star Robert Stack, Sea Hunt star Lloyd Bridges, and Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves.
That was the origin of their approach to comedy — play it totally straight, and totally absurd.
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